Galaxy GTX 560 Ti MDT X5

Galaxy is one of the few companies that aren’t afraid to experiment with new designs and technologies. Most companies prefer to go with the reference design and call it a day. Galaxy, on the oher hand will take the reference design and think of ways to better it or cram in more features. The GTX 560 Ti, which we’ll be reviewing today may seem like any ordinary graphics card, that is before you turn your attention to the number of monitors it supports, which is five. This special edition GTX 560 Ti comes equipped with a video chip that splits the signal from a single Display Port to four monitors. There is a small catch here, though, which we’ll get into a little later. First, let’s have a look at the card itself.

Design and Build
The MDT X5 is longer than a usual GTX 560 Ti and features Galaxy's own custom heatsink design. The entire heatsink is covered by an aluminium enclosure to channel the hot air directly outside the case. There are ventilation holes placed at strategic points on the heatsink for the intake of cool air, as well. The translucent fan used is rather puny, let's hope it's enough to cool the card. Unlike Galaxy’s previous graphic card designs, the fan is not removable for cleaning. You can however, quite easily remove the aluminium cover by unscrewing a couple of screws.

Built and designed well

The MDT X5 comes with four mini-HDMI connectors that are linked to an IDT ViewXpand (VMM1400 ) chip, allowing you to hook up four monitors to a single Display Port connector. The IDT chip supports Display Port v1.1a and HDMI v1.3. Now, before you get too excited, remember this still won't give you 3DVision Surround as Windows will detect all the four monitors as one and not as individual monitors. I’ll get into more details in the next section.

You'll never complain about connectivity again

The other two ports include a standard Display Port and a DVI-I port. Galaxy bundles all the necessary cables required to get you started. Along with a DVI-VGA adapter and the driver disk, we have a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable and three adapters for the same. Also present are two PCI-E to Molex power cables and a utility for multi-view monitors.

Two power connectors are required

Like any GTX 560 Ti, the card requires two PCI-E power connectors to run properly. This means, you’ll need a 500W PSU as the bare minimum and a good one at that. 

Features
Before we get into the multi-view setup, let’s get the main specifications out of the way. Although this a special edition card, Galaxy have gone with the reference specs from Nvidia. The core speed is clocked at 820MHz and the memory runs at 4000MHz (effective speed). We have a total of 1GB GDDR5 memory running on a 256-bit memory bus. Finally, we have full CUDA and PhysX support along with Nvidia 3DVision, PureVideo HD and DX11.

Now for the good stuff, let’s find out how well MDT (Multi-Display Technology) actually works. Before we begin, I’d like to point out that ZOTAC had demonstrated something similar at Computex 2011, only they called it multi-view technology. However, unlike Galaxy, ZOTAC only added one more additional display port for a three monitor setup, not five. You can have different configurations with the Galaxy card like, 2,3,4,4+1 monitor setups. See the chart below for the possible configurations.

Different types of configurations

Here’s the catch, though, it’s not possible to have a three monitor setup with Full HD monitors because there simply isn’t enough bandwidth for a single DP to transmit that kind of data. Unlike AMD’s Eyefinity, Nvidia’s Fermi architecture prohibits a single graphics card from powering three Full HD monitors. It’s simply not possible without SLI. What Galaxy and ZOTAC, for that matter are doing here is a cheaper alternative to 3DVision Surround, but at a price. As you add more monitors for multi-view, the resolution has to keep dropping, since the IDT chip will access the native resolution and automatically combine it.